These kooky Germans attached banner ads to flies, and set them free in the giant Frankfurt convention centre. It’s brilliant, and very worthy of notice and talkability. God knows what they were advertising (If I knew, I’d buy it), but the whole idea of making something so ordinary so utterly brilliant… It’s worthy of praise. Check out the video:
Dominos Pizza has been embarrassed by a scandal where some employees of the business made a video that showed them doing some pretty disgusting things with the food they were preparing. It is extremely damaging to the company. The videos are here – and an explanation of what they should be doing next follows.
Part 1 – The Offending Video
Part 2 – The Reponse from the US President of Dominos (why the hell is he speaking off camera? It’s completely wrong and seems completely staged).
Part 3 – What the Dominos President’s Response reminds me of (specifically at 4′15″)
What they should do:
Stop the rot – Sack the employees that have done this – and ensure that there are no other skeletons in the closet, whether known or unknown. Make sure that whatever it is that caused this issue is dealt with – and fixed.
Apologise – not from the President (who, as I mentioned earlier, is completely lame), but from employees of the company. Other people who work at Dominos – others who are in their late teens / early 20s, who are hard working, CLEAN and responsbile workers. Coming from them, it will be much more genuine. Imagine being an honest, hard-working Dominos employee right now – you’d be completely ashamed and embarrassed by the actions of two fools. If I were Dominos management, I’d be giving these employees every chance to express their sorrow and regret publicly – and have them honestly vow that they would never do such a thing. Coming from them – coming from all of them, employee by employee, store by store – it would be a company wide affirmation of their true values. It would ensure that the public would feel safe ordering food from them. It would reiterate the local presence of the company, and the care and mutual benefit that each Dominos franchise has for its community / customer base. Imagine it – a YouTube channel where every Dominos employee gets to make their own personal apology and vow to their customers – customers they value, customers who pay their bills. What a powerful statement of intent and purpose that would be.
Open up – I would ensure a rapid and public demonstration of the systems that Dominos has in place. What safety, what systems, what is in place to ensure this will never happen again. Put it all online, put it out there – every step of the value chain should be transparent. Every manager should be out there, explaining at every step how clean their systems are – from hiring to suppliers to food prep to service. This will allow people to overcome the fear they now have – I don’t know what happens in Dominos kitchens – nor do I know anything about how clean the food is.
Improve – Be daring – do something that would drive openness and engagement to a whole new level, eg: webcams in every kitchen, produce a series of podcasts on pizza making, Dominos staff cooking competitions across the country – demonstrate that Dominos food isn’t just prepared by College rejects, but by people who actually care about the food that they are providing. Build trust in Dominos as a place where you’ll have food that is not only clean, but tasty – or as the President said, delicious.
Australian workers are using lunch breaks as an opportunity to keep up with gossip, goings on and breaking news via video streams on Australia’s largest news media sites. So much so that lunchtime is becoming the new primetime.
I presented at the Frocomm New Media & PR Summit in Sydney recently, and one of my fellow speakers was Pippa Leary from Fairfax Online (one of Australia’s largest media groups, owners of broadsheets Melbourne’s The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, among others).
She described the huge growth in video delivery over the Fairfax Online network, from approximately 500,000 videos served in January 2007 to over 4.5m videos served in the month of January 2008 (with a particularly big spike when Heath Ledger died). The biggest spike, however, was during lunchtime, which Pippa described as the “new prime time”. She described how many people watched their short videos over lunchtime at their desks – when they had a spare 10-20 minutes.
People aren’t getting home in time to watch the six o’clock news, so they’re watching it when they want, and have the flexibility to watch what they want at that time. Another sign of the decline of appointment based media.
Other interesting points:
All Fairfax journos and sub-editors are being trained in Search Engine Optimisation – so that their opening paragraphs and headlines are search engine friendly. They’re also being encouraged to write tags for many of their articles which are incorporated into the meta tags for the page.
There is only a 20% crossover of readers between print and online for Fairfax.
Fairfax Online is relatively unpopular amongst people aged 55 and over, mainly because that age group assumes that the online version of the newspapers shows what’s already been printed, rather than breaking news. As most of them have already read the paper in the morning, they don’t think the online version will add anything new. An interesting perception issue – and something I’d assume would be similar to other traditional print brands around the world?
a blog by Con Frantzeskos about all things FUTURE, FREEDOM, FUN and FOOTY, encompassing: Digital Media, Marketing, Trends, Music, Culture, Entertainment, Politics, Business and Liberalism.
...and sport, particularly Collingwood!
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